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The Paypal mafia run paypal into the ground. Peter Thiel was the only sane person on that boat, as soon as he was put at the helm he did the only sensible thin
by GDC7 5y ago
The Paypal mafia run paypal into the ground.
Peter Thiel was the only sane person on that boat, as soon as he was put at the helm he did the only sensible thing:
Clear the deck and offload the ship to a bigger fool. Not exactly an heroic move.
The whole genuflection towards the product of survivorship bias is very cringe. I still think that the SV intelligencia does this in order to cater to an audience who'd buy thier books and invite them on podcasts.
Because otherwise....man it's really not that different from the gym goers who'd offer thier wives in tribute to Arnold if they could.
At least those guys have some six pack that comes with their cult to show for.
- parhamn 5y agoI really hate the use of 'survivorship bias' these days. It makes it seem like everything is just happenstance and nothing is consequential. Ask someone who uses the term, "what would be the indicator, this wasn't just survivorship?" and they rarely do come up with something. You can blame any success on survivorship. It's silly to do so.
- runawaybottle 5y agoIt’s also worth noting that a whole lot of them survived and made decent products. In fact, I’d say way too many of them survived for it to be a coincidence. If you think about most of our lives, little to no one makes it out alive from a company. The bosses get the money and the workers mostly stay workers indefinitely at the same company or at another one. This group somehow made sure they would never be workers again.
- GDC7 5y ago> what would be the indicator, this wasn't just survivorship? "From now on can you please fail on purpose?" 6 months later: "Okay, back to pursuing success" 3 months later: "Please could you start failing on purpose again?" 5 months later: "Back to pursuing success, please." 10 months later: "Please fail until you are back being a nobody" X years later: "Okay let's get back to the top again"
- WanderPanda 5y agoInterestingly survivorship/success is an unbiased estimator of merit imo. The actual survivorship bias comes from the high variance and only looking at the surviving/successful stories.
- GDC7 5y ago> Interestingly survivorship/success is an unbiased estimator of merit imo If that is the case, can you fail on purpose?
- WanderPanda 5y agoYes you can produce noise, I guess
- pbreit 5y agoThis seems like a gross representation of pretty much everything. The concept of "PayPal Mafia" as what they did AFTER PayPal (YouTube, LinkedIn, Yammer, Palantir, Yelp, Affirm, OpenDoor, Tesla, Spacex). Ebay bought PayPal for $1.5b and spun it out for $40b. Not exactly foolish.